Dave Emory’s entire life­time of work is avail­able on a flash drive that can be obtained here. (The flash drive includes the anti-fascist books avail­able on this site.)

Updated on 5/31/2013.

COMMENT: “Vanfield” gives us a very important post that distills a line of inquiry we’ve been pursuing for years. Cornell University professor Robert Kaplan notes that U.S. military intervention in the Muslim world occurs in former territories of the Ottoman Empire and results in Islamists coming to power for the ultimate benefit of–Germany!

In FTR #’s 710, 720, 723 we noted that the GOP/Underground Reich faction of the U.S. intelligence establishment was pursuing covert operations in the Earth Island, particularly in parts of Russia and China. Partnered in this is the Muslim Brotherhood and irredentist Turkish elements seeking a return to the glory days of the Ottoman Empire.

Before returning to the subject of the “Muslim Brotherhood Spring,” let’s highlight a key paragraph of the Kaplan essay, summing up an all-too familiar pattern in the operations that are bringing to power the German Hand in the Ottoman/Islamist glove:

. . . . Each U. S. military action in Europe and the Middle East since 1990, however, with the exception of Iraq, has followed an overt pattern: First there is an armed conflict within the country where the intervention will take place. American news media heavily report this conflict. The “good guys” in the story are the rebels. The “bad guys,” to be attacked by American military force, are brutally anti-democratic, and committers of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. Prestigious public figures, NGOs, judicial and quasi-judicial bodies and international organizations call for supporting the rebels and attacking the regime. Next, the American president orders American logistical support and arms supplies for the rebels. Finally the American president orders military attack under the auspices of NATO in support of the rebels. The attack usually consists of aerial bombing, today’s equivalent of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’ gunboat which could attack coastal cities of militarily weak countries without fear of retaliation. The ultimate outcome of each American intervention is the replacement of a secular government with an Islamist regime in an area that had been part of the Ottoman Empire. . . .

Another fascinating and very important part of the article concerns the ICC, much-ballyhooed by the so-called progressive sector in this and other countries:

. . . . From that article, “A Lawless Global Court” by John Rosenthal (Policy Review Feb. 1. 2004 No.123), one learns that the ICC is a project initiated, promoted and, to a considerable extent, funded by Germany. Given this, the idea that the ICC serves Germany’s purposes is common sense. Through the ICC connection, Germany’s promotion of the “Arab Spring” is clear. Yet it is never or almost never mentioned. This silence calls for explanation. . . .

Amen! That silence does indeed call for an explanation.

Notice, also, the German methodology here. Underscoring German power-political methodology prior to, and during, World War I, Kaplan’s analysis applies equally well to Nazi German’s geo-political orientation. It applies equally well to that of the Federal Republic, which, like the GOP and a disturbingly large part of the U.S. national security establishment, is controlled by Germany:

. . . . In the view of the leaders of Germany, Turkey was controllable through a combination of economic intercourse, gifts of educational opportunities, provision of technical expertise and administrative aid, as well as bribes to Turkish officials. Germany saw influence over Turkey as a means of influencing Moslems worldwide for its own interests. . . .

Let’s review the bullet points from the description of FTR #737(recorded on 4/2/2011.):

WikiLeaks appears to have played a role in the events, with a purported “leaked” State Department memo having helped spur the uprising in Tunisia which, in turn, helped to galvanize events in Egypt. Far from being the “progressive,” “whistle-blowing” entity it purports to be, WikiLeaks is a far-right, Nazi-influenced propaganda and data mining operation.

Karl Rove’s dominant presence in Sweden may well have much to do with the “leaking” of State Department cables from the Obama administration that are undoubtedly making the successful execution of statecraft even more difficult under the circumstances.

Far from being a spontaneous event, the Middle East uprisings appear to have stemmed, in part at least, from a covert operation begun under the Bush administration and continued under Obama’s tenure. (Obama may well have been set up to take the fall for negative consequences of the event. It is unclear just how “on top of it” his administration is. In this regard, the event is very much like the Bay of Pigs operation, begun under Eisenhower’s administration and continued under JFK.)

The operation may well be intended to destabilize the Obama administration, paving the way for the ascent of the GOP in the United States. In this respect, it is very much like what has come to be known as the October Surprise.

The Muslim Brotherhood’s free-market economic perspective has endeared it to laissez-faire theoreticians around the world. American University in Cairo, at which Brotherhood affiliated theoreticians hold forth, is an epicenter of the economic philosophy of Ibn Khaldun, the Ikhwan’s economic godfather.

The youthful idealists of the Anonymous/Pirate Bay/Pirate Party milieu appear to have been cynically deceived and manipulated into supporting an operation that figures to empower some truly dark forces. Those dark forces are fundamentally opposed to the Utopian values dear to the Anonymous/Pirate Bay folks.

Those same reassuring voices have told us that the Brotherhood aspires to a political agenda to the “moderate” agenda of the Turkish AK party. That party is closely affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood. The “moderation” of the AK Party may be weighed in the discussion below.

Precipitating the ascent of the fascist Muslim Brotherhood in the Middle East may well be an attempt at using the Muslim population of the Earth Island as a proxy force against Russia and China. The goal, ultimately, is to peel away strategic, resource-rich areas such, as the petroleum-rich areas of the Caucasus and Xinjiang province.

The Robert E. Kaplan post epitomizes the arguments I’ve been advancing for many years. Please digest it and disseminate the information to others. Although he does not mention it, veteran listeners and readers will no doubt recognize the presence of the Underground Reich in the concatenation that Kaplan presents. Detailing the evolution of the Underground Reich is beyond the scope of this post.

The wealth of information contained on this website will provide the necessary intellectual underpinning for interested and curious readers/listeners.

Suffice it to say here, that the proxy warriors of the neo-Ottoman caliphate will, ultimately, be used to destroy the U.S. and the U.K., as well as Israel.

With Obama responding to his long-forecast (in these quarters) destabilization by continuing to build bi-partisan bridges and committing political suicide in the process, this should be relatively easy to accomplish.

We also note that Germany is using “soft power” to promote Islamists in Syria (surprise, surprise).

Since the mid-1990s the United States has intervened militarily in several internal armed conflicts in Europe and the Middle East: bombing Serbs and Serbia in support of Izetbegovic’s Moslem Regime in Bosnia in 1995, bombing Serbs and Serbia in support of KLA Moslems of Kosovo in 1999, bombing Libya’s Gaddafi regime in support of rebels in 2010. Each intervention was justified to Americans as motivated by humanitarian concerns: to protect Bosnian Moslems from genocidal Serbs, to protect Kosovo Moslems from genocidal Serbs, and to protect Libyans from their murderous dictator Muammar Gaddafi.

Other reasons for these interventions were also offered: to gain for the United States a strategic foothold in the Balkans, to defeat communism in Yugoslavia, to demonstrate to the world’s Moslems that the United States is not anti-Moslem, to redefine the role of NATO in the post-Cold War era, among others.

Each of these United States military interventions occurred in an area that had been part of the Ottoman Empire. In each, a secular regime was ultimately replaced by an Islamist one favoring sharia law and the creation of a world-wide Caliphate. The countries that experienced the “Arab Spring” of the 2010s without the help of American military intervention, Tunisia and Egypt, had also been part of the Ottoman Empire, and also ended up with Islamist regimes.

In the United States most discussions of the military conflicts of the 1990s in the Balkans and the “Arab Spring” of the 2010s do not mention that the areas involved had been part of the Ottoman Empire; these included Turkey, the Moslem-populated areas around the Mediterranean, Iraq, the coastal regions of the Arabian Peninsula and parts of the Balkans. In the areas that experienced the Arab Spring Turkey’s role in every instance has been to support the rebels and quickly recognize them as the legitimate government of the country in upheaval.

Turkish leaders do make the connection between the conflicts in the Bosnia, the “Arab Spring” and the Ottoman Empire. Harold Rhode, an American expert on Turkey, has reported:

[President of Turkey] Erdogan’s recent [2011] electoral victory speech puts his true intentions regarding Turkey’s foreign policy goals in perspective. He said that this victory is as important in Ankara as it is in the capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Sarajevo, under Ottoman times, an important Ottoman city; that his party’s victory was as important in a large Turkish city Izmir, on the Western Anatolian coast, as it is in Damascus, and as important in Istanbul as it is in Jerusalem….

In saying that this victory is as important in all of these former Ottoman cities, Erdogan apparently sees himself as trying to reclaim Turkey’s full Ottoman past.

The occurrence that since 1990 each European and Middle Eastern country that experienced American military intervention in an internal military conflict or an “Arab Spring” has ended up with a government dominated by Islamists of the Moslem Brotherhood or al-Qaeda variety fits nicely with the idea that these events represent a return to Ottoman rule. Besides being a political empire ruling a territory and its population, the Ottoman Empire claimed to be a Caliphate with spiritual suzerainty over all Moslems – those within its borders and those beyond. Though it might seem strange at first, the idea of advancing the renewal of the Ottoman Empire on two tracks – breaking down the post-Ottoman political structure and promoting a Caliphate which Islamists say they long for – is really quite reasonable.

Just as the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s and the “Arab Spring” of the 2010s considered in historical perspective suggests that Turkey might be attempting to recreate its former empire, consideration of the Turkish Empire in historical perspective suggests the possible partnership of Germany with Turkey in the project given that, from its creation in 1870, Germany viewed Turkey with its empire as a most valuable client and ally. In the view of the leaders of Germany, Turkey was controllable through a combination of economic intercourse, gifts of educational opportunities, provision of technical expertise and administrative aid, as well as bribes to Turkish officials. Germany saw influence over Turkey as a means of influencing Moslems worldwide for its own interests. Thus as the German scholar Wolfgang Schwanitz has shown, during World War I Germany employed the Turkish Caliphate to promote jihad – riot and rebellion – in areas where Moslem populations were ruled by its enemies Russia, France, Britain and Serbia.

Yet in the 50-odd articles collected in an exploration of the awareness on the part of Americans of a possible Turkish connection with the “Arab Spring,” I found not a single mention of “Germany.”Only from a link in one of those articles – to an article on the International Criminal Court (ICC) which, with its indictment of Muammar Gaddafi and issue of a warrant for his arrest, provided the “legal” basis legitimizing NATO’s bombing of Libya — which gave the rebels their victory and ended the Gaddafi regime – did I find mention of Germany. From that article, “A Lawless Global Court” by John Rosenthal (Policy Review Feb. 1. 2004 No.123), one learns that the ICC is a project initiated, promoted and, to a considerable extent, funded by Germany. Given this, the idea that the ICC serves Germany’s purposes is common sense. Through the ICC connection, Germany’s promotion of the “Arab Spring” is clear. Yet it is never or almost never mentioned. This silence calls for explanation.

Later, I did come across an explicit reference to Germany’s role in it — specifically in the war against the Assad regime in Syria — in John Rosenthal’s article “German Intelligence: al-Qaeda all over Syria” in the online Asia Times ­­­­­­­­­­­­ — which reports that the German government supports the rebels and their political arm, the Syrian National Council (SNC), against Assad; that the German government classified [made secret] “by reason of national interest” the contents of several BND (German foreign intelligence) reports that the May 25, 2012 massacre of civilians in the Syrian town of Houla, for which Assad has been blamed, was in fact perpetrated by rebel forces; and that “the German foreign office is working with representatives of the Syrian opposition to develop ‘concrete plans’ for a ‘political transition’ in Syria after the fall of Assad.” So far the German policy of keeping hidden its leadership role in the attempt to reconstitute the Ottoman Empire seems to have succeeded.

Each U. S. military action in Europe and the Middle East since 1990, however, with the exception of Iraq, has followed an overt pattern: First there is an armed conflict within the country where the intervention will take place. American news media heavily report this conflict. The “good guys” in the story are the rebels. The “bad guys,” to be attacked by American military force, are brutally anti-democratic, and committers of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. Prestigious public figures, NGOs, judicial and quasi-judicial bodies and international organizations call for supporting the rebels and attacking the regime. Next, the American president orders American logistical support and arms supplies for the rebels. Finally the American president orders military attack under the auspices of NATO in support of the rebels. The attack usually consists of aerial bombing, today’s equivalent of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’ gunboat which could attack coastal cities of militarily weak countries without fear of retaliation. The ultimate outcome of each American intervention is the replacement of a secular government with an Islamist regime in an area that had been part of the Ottoman Empire.

Why the government of the United States would actively promote German aims — the destruction of Yugoslavia (both World Wars I and II saw Germany invade Serbia) and the re-creation of the Ottoman Empire — is a question that needs to be answered.

In light of the recent Syrian government’s military successes, the German government seeks to stabilize rebel controlled areas in northern Syria. While demands for a comprehensive arms buildup for rebel militias are becoming louder, the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs is positioning aid organizations to intervene. Aid organizations, such as the German Agro Action, are – in principle – sworn to neutrality and non-partisanship, however, at the demand of the German government, they are taking up activities in regions under rebel control, aimed at “winning hearts and minds” in favor of the rebels. Because this is in clear violation of Syria’s sovereignty, an influential German daily has characterized this mission as “humanitarian intervention without a UN mandate” – “not with tanks and infantry but with trucks and development aid workers.” Germany is promoting insurgents also in areas under Islamist control. . . .

. . . . Nevertheless, to assure German presence on Syrian territory, according to the report, in late summer 2012, the German Foreign Ministry turned to various development aid organizations – at first during the regular meetings of the Coordinating Committee of Humanitarian Aid. It is reported that, regardless of the absence of Syrian government permission, these aid organizations were “asked to become active in insurgent-controlled areas – in spite of international law.”[7] In fact, at the foreign ministry’s request, several German development aid organizations are now illegally active on the ground in rebel-controlled areas of Syria – from Berlin’s perspective – carrying out partisan activities in support of the insurgents. Government functionaries, such as the GIZ representative, stationed in Gaziantep, are not permitted to carry out these activities, due to qualms about their illegality. The German government is tolerating the eventuality of long-term losses, these development aid organizations could suffer, due to the breach of their obligations to neutrality and non-partisanship. This violation of Syria’s territorial sovereignty by the aid organizations’ activities is aptly described in the report: “What is currently taking place in the border areas, is (…) a humanitarian intervention without a UN mandate: not with tanks and infantry, but with trucks and development workers.”

The Islamization of Syria

German “humanitarian intervention” in favor of insurgents in the Syrian civil war is also being carried out in areas under the control of Islamist militias. In the summer of 2012, the German “Green Helmet” organization, for example, initiated its support activities in the small town of Azaz, in northern Syria. It is usually claimed that this town is under the control of the “Free Syrian Army,” which serves as the umbrella label for various groups. However, critical reports soon exposed that Azaz is, in fact, ruled by “Jihadists and other (…) armed Islamists.” Azaz serves “as a transit hub for armed fighters, from various countries, seeking to wage a ‘holy war’ against infidels.” They aggressively attack those of a different faith, including Yazidi, living near Azaz.[8] Recent reports have confirmed that the Jabhat al Nusra terrorist organization is active in that town. The same report points to the presence of German Salafists in Azaz.[9] From the perspective of the German government, Germany’s “humanitarian intervention” in favor of the insurgents of the Syrian civil war – motivated by geostrategic hegemonic interests (german-foreign-policy.com reported [10]) – is contributing, in cases such as Azaz, to the consolidation of fanatical Islamist hegemony.

Discussion

7 comments for “More Turkish Taffy: Germany, the U.S. and the Neo-Ottoman Empire (Doin’ the Earth Island Boogie, Part 2)”

This article Vanfield researched may be one of the most important article so far this year.

It seems to me that when George Bush Sr. commented about “The New World Order”, he was refering to a re-structuring to “The Old World Order”, right down to the Ottoman Empire.

I got in touch with my correspondent on things Turkish and my main question – in addition to where is this going? – is who are the police?

I asked for this reason. The police in Turkey were always part of Turkey’s so-called ‘deep state’ – the mix of formal and informal organizations, factions and government bodies who depending on your point of view were either the guardians of Kemalism or the shadowy forces who really ran Turkey beneath the veneer of electoral democracy. Broadly speaking, that would mean they were a deeply Kemalist institution. But with the national police now striking so hard against the anti-Erdogan demonstrators, who are the police at this point? Have they been transformed over the decade of Erdogan’s time in power? Who are the leaders? Who are the rank and file?

Here’s what our correspondent told me …

Supposedly the police are the biggest arm of the state that’s been “infiltrated” by the Gülenists. Many people are convinced that the police is a largely Gülenist organization, if not at the absolute leadership levels then certainly among the rank and file of the police force. Pretty much everyone in the police does a stint in the Southeast where they spend a few years beating the crap out of Kurdish protesters, so this is not a new change of tactics for them; sadly, this is the same playbook they’ve always used against Kurds, but now that it’s against middle class and elite protesters it’s getting more media attention outside of the country. I wonder if someone’s given the police orders to be this brutal, or if it’s just the natural reaction of the Turkish police to fight back against protesters. I think the latter’s more likely. Regardless, I assume someone in the Interior Ministry will have to resign at some point or another over this, but I doubt it will go much higher than that unless it gets much worse in the next few days.

I don’t know how this will end up; I think it depends on what happens while Erdogan is out of the country. The outcome I find most likely is that the proposed strike tomorrow fizzles and that people just angrily go back to work in a few days. Erdogan holds on, and things continue as they were. It’s possible an internal AKP opposition faction could force Erdogan to back down, though I don’t know who would lead that. (Could be Gül, which would be interpreted as a Gülen power play, could be someone else.) No matter how much the CHP criticizes, they just don’t have the public support, charisma, or experience to form a government of their own, and they won’t get in bed with either of the other two parties either. Even if all three were to come together, they can’t beat the AKP’s numbers. Yes, it’s been a while since the election in 2011, but the AKP’s fundamental support hasn’t changed all that much. On the flip side, the coverage that’s finally getting out of the police violence seems to be shocking many run-of-the-mill Turks. If the AKP/Erdogan get the blame for that, it could hurt their numbers.

The next election is scheduled tentatively for the summer of 2015, and at some point the Parliament (TBMM) is supposed to release a draft constitution for referendum that will presumably propose a switch to a presidential (instead of parliamentary) system. Erdogan wants to be the head of state in 2023, for the centennial of the country. I doubt he’ll do anything to seriously jeopardize his future electoral successes. He’s a smart politician – one of the smartest I’ve ever seen. He’s not out of the picture yet, not by any stretch. I would argue that this event is no more authoritarian (though certainly more provocative) than any of his other ridiculous plans to consolidate power, such as the Ergenekon/Balyoz trials that have decimated the officer corps in the military. Those are actually much more corrosive, but because they are perversions of the judiciary and not blatant, televised violence, they didn’t attract as much popular disgust.

So part of the larger context over the growing national freakout over Erdogan’s regime includes a planned constitutional overhaul that will allow him to become president in 2023. That doesn’t exactly sound like the kind of scenario that’s going to make anti-Muslim Brotherhood movement go away.

To simply say “protestors good, government bad” in Turkey is a symptom of the Blair delusion, that in civil conflicts there are guys with white hats and guys with black hats, and that the West’s role is to ride into town and kill the guys in the black hats. That is what “liberal intervention” means. The main aim of my second autobiographical book, “The Catholic Orangemen of Togo”, was to explain through the truth of the Sierra Leone experience how very, very wrong this is.

In fact civil conflicts are usually horribly complex, anent a variety of very bad people all trying to gain or retain power, none of them from an altruistic desire to make the world a better place. There may be ordinary people on the streets with that altruistic desire, being used and manipulated by these men; but it is not the ordinary altruistic people on the streets who ever come to power. Ever.

In Turkey the heavy crushing of a rainbow of protests in Istanbul has been going on for at least a month now. A week ago I was discussing it with my publisher, whose son lives in the city. A fortnight ago I was in Istanbul myself.

The Turkish people I was with were natural Erdogan supporters, and what struck me very forcibly was the fact that he has sickened many of his own natural allies by the rampant corruption in Turkey at present. Almost everyone I met spoke to me about corruption, and Turkey being Turkey, everyone seemed to know a very great deal of detail about how corruption was organised in various building and development projects and who was getting what. It therefore is hardly surprising that the spark which caused this conflict to flare to a new level was ignited by a corrupt deal to build a shopping centre on a park. The desecration of something lovely for money could be a metaphor for late Erdogan government.

The park is very small beer compared to the massive corruption involved in the appalling and megalomaniac Bosphorus canal project. Everyone talked to me about that one. The mainstream media, who never seem to know what is happening anywhere, seem to have missed that a major cause of the underlying unrest in Istanbul was the government’s announcement eight weeks ago that the Bosphorus canal is going ahead.

People are also incensed by the new proposal that would ban the sale of alcohol within 100 metres of any mosque or holy site, ie anywhere within central Istanbul. That would throw thousands of people out of work, damage the crucial tourist trade and is rightly seen as a symptom of reprehensible mounting religious intolerance that endangers Turkish society.

So there are plenty of legitimate reasons to protest, and the appalling crushing of protest is the best of them

But – and this is what it is never in the interest of Western politicians to understand – Government bad does not equal protestors good. A very high proportion – more than the British public realise by a very long way – of those protesting in the streets are off the scale far right nationalists of a kind that make the BNP look cuddly and Nigel Farage look like Tony Benn. Kemalism – the worship of Ataturk and a very unpleasant form of military dominated nationalism – remains very strong indeed in Istanbul. Ataturk has a very strong claim, ahead of Mussolini, to be viewed as the inventor of modern fascism

For every secular liberal in Istanbul there are two secular ultra-nationalist militarists. To westerners they stress the secular bit and try to hide the rest, and this works on the uncurious (being uncurious is a required attribute to get employed by the mainstream media). Of course there are decent, liberal, environmentalist protestors and the media will have no difficulty, now they have finally noticed something is happening, in filling our screens with beautiful young women who fit that description, to interview. But that is not all of what is going on here.

There certainly was no more freedom in Turkey before the AKP came to power. Government for decades had been either by the Kemalist military in dictatorship or occasionally by civilian governments they tolerated and controlled. People suddenly have short memories if they think protest was generally tolerated pre-Erdogan, and policy towards the Kurds was massively more vicious.

The military elite dominated society and through corruption they dominated commerce and the economy. The interests of a protected and generally fascist urban upper middle class were the only interests that counted at all. The slightest threat to those interests brought a military coup – again, and again, and again. Religion was barely tolerated, and they allied closely with Israel and the United States.

When Erdogan first came to power it was the best thing that had happened to Turkey for decades. The forgotten people of the Anatolian villages, and the lower middle class of the cities, had a voice and a position in the state for the first time. In individual towns and villages, the military and their clients who had exercised absolute authority had their power suddenly diminished. I witnessed this and it was a new dawn, and it felt joyous.

Then of course Erdogan gradually got sucked in to power, to money, to NATO, to the corruption of his Black Sea mafia and to arrogance. It all went very wrong, as it always seems to. That is where we are now.

Yes of course I want those pretty, genuinely liberal environmentalist girls in the park to take power. But they won’t. Look at the hard-eyed fascists behind them. Look at the western politicians licking their lips thinking about the chance to get a nice very right wing, anti-Muslim and pro-Israel government into power.

We should all be concerned at what is happening in Turkey. We should all call for an end to violent repression. But to wish the overthrow of a democratically elected government, and its replacement – by what exactly? – is a very, very foolish reaction.
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Sample comments:

“This is the best English-language article about this event so far. I hope it’s read by many people. It’s pretty close to what I think as a liberal Turkish citizen.”
——–
“This is the only sensible and true commentary I’ve seen on recent events in Turkey. I’ve been living in Istanbul for 2 years now, and have always been amazed at the fact that it is virtually impossible to meet anybody with a sane grasp of Turkish history, or a genuinely progressive outlook on equal rights for minorities. The government has brought exactly the benefits and troubles you mention, but the protesters have no clear vision, and bring with them disturbing ideological baggage of their own. It is all very well to try to save a park, but the protesters themselves would all tell you that their goal is much more sweeping than that. They are against the ruling party’s corruption, but blind to the faults of the other party, which are mired in nationalist exceptionalism and a Disney version of history.”
————
“I think you’ve misjudged the geopolitics here. Erdogan is a NATO puppet of the Fethullah Gullen school of Islamization that allows the CIA to control client states like Turkey much as the Muslim Brotherhood is a CIA outfit to control Egypt after the synthetically triggered Arab Spring (A CIA colour revolution).

All of this is detailed on FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds site or her interviews with James Corbett. It takes a day or two to digest all the information that presented but after that there’s no question how the region operates.”
—————–
“‘Look at the western politicians licking their lips thinking about the chance to get a nice very right wing, anti-Muslim and pro-Israel government into power.’

I don’t believe this is at at all what Western powers want. It increasingly appears to me they want Arab states to come under the Muslim Brotherhood umbrella. Once they do, all policy can be controlled from the top by either Turkey or Qatar and will conform to Western needs. Muslim Brotherhood’s agenda looks democratic but then once in power step by step this changes. In Libya the instability at the moment is caused by the underhand machinations of the Brotherhood.”

@Dave: You have to wonder if Morsi’s behavior or the behavior of any of the other new Muslim Brotherhood leaders in the region has anything to do with shifting attitudes in Turkey. After all, Turkey’s youth saw the Muslim Brotherhood proceed to first hijack and one protest movement after another and they took over the entire nations in a giant power grab. What impact could that have had on attitudes towards the AKP because it was the AKP’s “brothers” that were doing all of that? Morsi’s behavior symbolically underscores what the protestors appear to hate about Erdogan so who know, maybe he played a role. Heh.

Having the Muslim Brotherhood control so much of the region at once might have its advantages, but we could be seeing emergence of an interesting cross-border political dynamic that will only grow stronger as Muslim Brotherhood governments continue run roughshod over civil society. Even if Morsi’s antics played absolutely no role in shifting Turkish attitudes, the fact that we have the same crazy cult running so many neighboring countries all at once during internet era when we can all observe cross-border shenanigans raises the fascinating possibility that we’re eventually going to see all sorts of new cross-border political vulnerabilities for the Muslim Brothers. At least one can hope. There are many obvious strengths to having your crazy cult take over a region. But there might be a few additional vulnerabilities too.

Expert says the number of German Islamists in Syria has increased from 60 to 150 in the last six months.

BERLIN – Radical German Islamists participated in the murders of Syrian Christians in an early August attack on the Turkish-Syrian border, according to a report in the German magazine FOCUS.

The magazine reported last week the involvement of nearly 100 “fanatical” German Muslims, including Germans who converted to Islam, in the Syrian civil war.

Two Western intelligence agencies provided the information to FOCUS about the role of German Islamists in the August massacre.

A German police official told the magazine that “the complicity of Germans in the extermination and ethnic cleansing in Syria is a sheer intolerable condition.”

Prosecutors are examining whether the German Muslims can be charged with participation in a terrorist organization.

The growing presence of German Islamists in Syria prompted the Federal Republic’s interior minister Hans-Peter Friedrich to issue a warning in April about the “calls for those Europeans who have been trained in battle [in Syria] to return home and pursue jihad.”

The Sunni Salafist movement in Germany has provided the main combatants for the conflict against Syrian President Bashar Assad’s regime. Dirk Baehr, a German political scientist who has written about European and German jihadi groups, told The Jerusalem Post on Tuesday that six months ago there were 60 German Islamists in Syria and now the number has climbed to 150. Many of the jihadis fighting in Syria are from Belgium, Baehr added.

In a video cited in the FOCUS report, which appears in German and Arabic, German jihadists praise the expulsion of Christians from the Syrian villages. The video shows between nine and 10 jihadis walking by dead people. Baehr said it is difficult to ascertain if the dead individuals are Christians.

One Islamic combatant strikes the head of a dead Syrian soldier in the video.

Former gangster rapper from Berlin, Denis Cuspert (a.k.a Deso Dogg), is believed to be fighting with the al-Qaida-linked al-Nusra Front. German counter-terrorism officials view Cuspert as a powerful recruitment tool. He made a video before his departure to Syria, urging Muslims to join the jihad in Syria.